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that offers."
    Dalissem nodded with slow, harsh-eyed approval. "Well spoken little mortal. You know, Haldar Dirkniss, that you are not a little man." She said this sharply as my friend was bridling again. "Others have passed this way through even these few years. I have let them pass. Sent up no feelers of my thought. Would I have cast my nets entire, and climbed this infinite, high climb for little men? Come nearer, and I will put in your memory the manner of your coming, and the spell."
    My friend put his ear to her lips. She whispered for a long while, and my friend looked outward as he listened, but you could see from the dazed shifts of his eyes, strange spaces opening in his mind.
    She let her head roll to the side when she had done. Her body gave an exhausted shudder, and just barely regained its tension. "Stand away," she hissed. "Turn your backs. I must return the way I came. In the face of horror, keep your thoughts on the Key. It will be yours."
    We turned away. The reeking cold washed over us. The foaming sound of ten thousand little maggot jaws got louder and louder. Two fat tears jumped out of my friend's eyes and sank into his beard. That night we slept without guard. Death's presence was so strong in the place no wolf would come near it for many days.
    My horse had stayed within the boulderfall, its nose having quickly told it of the wolves' departure. We rose before the sun and saddled up, having decided to run and ride in shifts. I took the first turn running. As we started out in the first light of day, Haldar said musingly: "You know, Nifft. She told me far more than the spell, and the information about Defalk and Shamblor. There were a thousand other things too, endless they seemed."
    "Well what were they?" I asked.
    "I don't know! She left them all there inside me, just past the reach of my thought."
    He rode and I trotted on. I left it to him to call the time. I ran all morning long, so far away his mind was. I didn't object to it for three or four hours, greyhound though I am. But at length I had to rouse him. He swore he had not thought an hour gone.

III
     
    Defalk of Lurkna Downs went to many inns and taverns in the course of a day. He went to the fashionable ones in the Exchange district, which stands on giant floats upon the lake, just off shore; he went to the more colorful ones in the wharfside district ashore; he went to the ones in the old center of the city where the chambers of law stood. Where he went depended on whether he was talking to a broker, or negotiating the sale of a haul of his father-in-law's fishing fleet, or cajoling a judge in Maritime Equity to smile upon a renewed charter to fish some particularly rich zone of the vast Great Cleft Lake. I promise you the pair of us learned Lurkna Downs well in the course of dogging the fellow and marking his ways and times. We worked with an ear always pricked to the news of Fleetmaster Shamblor's progress. He didn't command a fleet, you understand, he owned one—one of the city's largest. Gossip about his condition was abundant and we sifted it carefully, for his death was to be the door through which we took our quarry. The Fleetmaster rallied briefly shortly after our arrival, and gave us a week that we did not waste.
    The upshot was that on our chosen afternoon, I crouched in an alley alongside the Quill and Scroll Inn. This is in the center of the city and the narrowness of the streets there decided our choice, for it compels passersby, if they wish to ride, to use one of the runner-drawn chariots that are the district's only feasible form of taxi. Defalk never walked when he could ride, and he lunched here almost every day.
    On the previous night I had been inside the inn—after hours, you understand—and improved a crack high in the wall through which I could command the side of the inn our quarry almost always sat on. Empty crates in the alley screened me from any who glanced into it as they passed. I mounted a barrel and applied